Advanced Cake Decorating Techniques with Michelle Bommarito at ICE’s Center for Advanced Pastry Studies

ICE’s Center for Advanced Pastry Studies, led by Director Michelle Tampakis, is an incredibly unique program that brings the world’s leading pastry chefs to teach multi-day workshop classes for working pastry and baking professionals, taught by visiting chefs and pastry artists from around the world.

Courses are two to three days in duration and are limited to 14 students. Earlier this week, ICE alum Michelle Bommarito traveled from Michigan to teach one of these classes. In addition to frequently being seen on Food Network Challenge, she was named one of the Top Ten Cake Artists for 2011 by Dessert Professional magazine. While visiting, she made ICE’s kitchens her workshop to teachi the professional students a variety of techniques for decorating and sculpting cakes.

Over the course of three days, the students made elegant sculpted tiered cakes, a boutique-style shopping bag cake of their own design, and a variety of cupcakes as well. Bommarito arranged for Satin Ice to donate a variety of different colors of fondant and gumpaste for the students to learn how to apply fondant to create a porcelain-like finish and sculpt realistic tissue paper from gum paste.

The students also practiced piping to create intricate patterns. Bommarito even demonstrated how to pipe royal icing over a balloon to create a delicate sphere once the icing dried and the balloon was popped. Scroll through the photos below to see some of the students work and the new skills they learned. If you’re a pastry and baking professional looking to advance your skills, check out the rest of our classes here. There really is no other program of its kind in the US.

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